[BC] Dish life (was: Sat dishes vs snow)

[SHAFFER, RANDY L]

Sherrod Munday wrote -
(snip)
>This of course is not even to mention the issue of the physical condition of a 
>25-year-old dish (hurricanes, snow load, wind, ice, hail, etc.) -- just the 
>original design spec (4-degree spacing was prevalent at that time) versus 
>what the FCC authorized (2-degree spacing) later.

>I'd be interested to hear if you're using that ~25-year-old dish to receive 
>digital carriers, and if so, which ones...

Okay, now that I think of it, only one dish is 25 years old, the other four that I'm thinking of are the original CBS net dish system that was installed in 1983, so they wouldn't be 25 yet. We also have a WOLD dish (7m) from the mid 80's that is about 20. The WOLD dish is on Galaxy 4 receiving Pathfire, CNN, WB, and Shepherd's Chapel. Except for the latter, they are all digital feeds. CBS is still using the original dish system 7m and 4.5m for HD feeds and regular digital net feeds. Of course the feed horns have been totally rebuilt and we have to chase the squirrels out of the back of the dish sometimes but otherwise they still function for receiving. One 7m dish we now have fixed, since the motor no longer functions to move it.
 
We have had to do repairs along the way. Feed horn supports have been snapped by falling ice, dish petals have been punched through by falling ice but, otherwise they seem to do okay. The 1981 steerable is used for analog backup only. 

I do like some of the suggestions for snow and ice. We decided not to do covers since we didn't like the slight signal loss. On some KU news and sports feeds it seems we are riding the edge of getting a clean feed and the cover would do us in. I did get heat tape last year to install on one of the smaller dishes this year...but haven't tried it yet. I do like the idea of the blast heater on the bottom 1/3 of the dish. We have several heaters that we use for transmitter coolant changes. I think I'll try one of them on the next storm. I'm not sure the neighbors will like the blower noise though.

Randy Shaffer
WLYH-TV/WHP-TV
Clear Channel Television 
Harrisburg, PA 17110